[alfa] administrivia: ongoing digest support

[Richard Welty <rwelty@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

some discussion took place over onging digest support on offtopic, which
i'll share in short form later on in this message. a rough plan is in
place.

contributions to date have been significant, extremely helpful, and much
appreciated.

what is interesting is that percentage of readers who have chosen to
contribute is slightly more than 3% of the total readership. this tells me
several things:

1) subscriptions would probably kill these lists. i was already opposed
   to imposing subscriptions, because i suspected this was true.

2) possibly some of you don't want to make "silly" contributions. one
   person who contributed actually apologized and hoped i wouldn't be
   insulted by the amount. there's no danger of that.

3) some may not want to deal with paypal's "cut". i now know that it's
   2.9% + a little, which isn't horribly painful.

if the percentage of the readership contributing somehow made it up to 10%,
the situation would change from "contributions were extremely helpful" to
"contributions got me out of trouble".

now, for details of the rough plan.

a very succient announcement will be published quarterly. i am planning to
send the first one on December 1st, and subsequently on March 1st, June
1st, and September 1st, using an automated process. the draft announcement
may be viewed here:

  /contribution-message.txt

it contains a link to the standing contributions page:

  /digest-contribution.html

this page will be in place more-or-less permanently.

note that the permanent contribution page lists projects that contributions
help fund. be aware that while the current level of contributions rates as
extrememly helpful, in fact it totals up to the cost of the new server plus
the cost of about 1 year's colocation fees for the server.

long term, if i can make the time available, i plan to migrate to a model
where the digests are supported by a suite of low cost online services
targeted towards digest readers -- pop3 accounts with good spam and virus
protection (username@domain.elided, anyone?), inexpensive web hosting
(http://members.digest.net/username/, for example), and so forth. getting
to that point will be tricky, it will take a fair chunk of my time to
finish getting the new server ready, and the current server doesn't have
the horsepower to run an antivirus daemon for a lot of email.

richard
-- 
Richard Welty                                         rwelty@domain.elided
Averill Park Networking                                         518-573-7592
    Java, PHP, PostgreSQL, Unix, Linux, IP Network Engineering, Security
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